Forge Hill bridge nearly ready for bids

Sunday

Aug 25, 2013 at 2:00 AM

NEW WINDSOR - As the second anniversary of Hurricane Irene approaches, Don Bigi finds it hard to wrap his head around why the Forge Hill Road bridge still hasn't been fixed. Bigi, after all, remembers when he was in the Marines and how they'd build a bridge in six hours, then run tanks over it. "We can't understand why it's taking so long," said Bigi, referring to the 300 homeowners in Butterhill Estates who have pressed town, county, state and federal government for a quick fix. The short answer to why it's taking so long — and why another Irene anniversary will come and go before the Forge Hill Road bridge is fixed — is that the state and the feds view the repairs as the equivalent of a replacement.

Judy Rife

NEW WINDSOR — As the second anniversary of Hurricane Irene approaches, Don Bigi finds it hard to wrap his head around why the Forge Hill Road bridge still hasn't been fixed.

Bigi, after all, remembers when he was in the Marines and how they'd build a bridge in six hours, then run tanks over it.

"We can't understand why it's taking so long," said Bigi, referring to the 300 homeowners in Butterhill Estates who have pressed town, county, state and federal government for a quick fix.

The closing of the county road not only compromised one of the two exits from their development, but also cost New Windsor and Cornwall residents their primary bypass of the perpetual traffic tangle in Vails Gate, the retail heart of the two towns.

The detoured traffic blocked the Route 94 exit from Butterhill Estates until exasperated homeowners ("voters" in Bigi parlance) papered the state Department of Transportation with petitions for a temporary traffic signal.

The short answer to why it's taking so long — and why another Irene anniversary will come and go before the Forge Hill Road bridge is fixed — is that the state and the feds view the repairs as the equivalent of a replacement.

"The simple answer to why this is considered a new bridge is that the storm widened the streambed, and the repaired bridge will be longer and have an additional pier than the original bridge," said Jennifer Post, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Transportation.

Building a new bridge requires a time-consuming slough through the state and federal environmental review process — a decade-long slough in the case of the Tappan Zee Bridge, for example.

Orange County had no choice but to repeat the environmental review that was done when it replaced the then-42-year-old bridge in 2002, not if it wanted the feds to pick up 80 percent of the $3 million tab for the fix.

Chuck Lee, the county's public works commissioner, said the necessity of repeating the exacting six-part process wasn't surprising given the extent, and the unique nature, of the damage to the bridge. Irene wrecked 30 county roads and bridges, but none worse than the Forge Hill Road bridge, the only one that remains closed today. The county repaired most of them at state and federal expense within the 180-day window for emergency fixes independent of any environmental review.

Then Lee turned to WSP Sells, the consulting engineers who oversaw the replacement of the Forge Hill Road bridge in 2002, to oversee its repair.

"What made this unique was what happened to the streambed," said Dave Weiss, vice president for infrastructure at WSP Sells. "It's not often you see this kind of effect, but Irene was quite a storm."

Irene's fury eroded the bed and banks of Moodna Creek to the point that the streambed was moved more than 40 feet to the east and the bridge was left hanging.

The fix that Weiss' team has designed will turn the two-span bridge into a three-span one, adding a second pier and extending its abutment-to-abutment length from 275 feet to 365 feet. The repairs will actually translate into 155 feet of new deck, because part of the old one has to be demolished to ensure a good fit for the extension.

"There's real engineering involved here," said Weiss. "It's not the kind of low-tech damage that could have been fixed quickly or easily."

In fact, until his team did a hands-on inspection, Weiss wasn't certain that the bridge wouldn't have to be replaced. And a completely new bridge would have resulted in more impact to the Moodna, which runs under the bridge, and a longer environmental review.

"But the bridge is sound," said Weiss. "It performed the way it was supposed to; there was no catastrophic failure."

WSP Sells' familiarity with the bridge was an asset in moving the environmental review along, but Weiss said a bigger boon was the state authorizing the firm to do portions of the six-part process concurrently, rather than sequentially. (The DOT acts as the feds' agent and funding conduit.)

"Working out of phase was a first for us," said Weiss. "It's rare. Usually the process is the process."

The previous environmental review couldn't be used again, because it was stale and insufficient for today's requirements. The feds, for instance, now demand releases from any Native American tribe that once populated a project site. Weiss got them, from three tribes.

WSP Sells completed the process in 11 months versus the 30 months it took in 2002. The state has the final revisions of the final documents in hand and Post, the DOT spokeswoman, said the county will get the green light to advertise for bids "within the next month or so."

Construction, Weiss said, will start in the spring and finish before the end of 2014, if not before Irene's third anniversary.

Bigi and his neighbors in Butterhill Estates still think their government could have, should have, moved faster at every level.

After all, it will take the rebuilding of the town's Butternut Drive, not just the reopening of the county's Forge Hill Road, to make them whole again.

Irene also washed away Butternut, the steep road that links the development to Forge Hill and represents its other exit. The town, which ballparks a new road and a stabilized hillside at $1 million-plus, has yet to nail down the promised funds from the feds, much less a construction schedule.

"It's a sad state of affairs, our bureaucracy," said New Windsor Supervisor George Green. "People have a right to be frustrated; I'm frustrated. There are all sorts of good reasons why this is taking so long, but the bottom line is that it's been two years."